User Experience Design of History Game (original) (raw)

FROM DUSK OF THE INFORMATION ERA TO DAWN OF THE EXPERIENCE ERA: VIDEOGAMES AS A LEARNING TOOL

2017

Knowledge institutions are often distracted by themselves and unable to understand what happens in the world of cultural consumption. the videogame, for example, is quite different from all other media forms, owning its peculiar language, the gameplay: an interactive, experiential participation which guarantees a form of involvement that no other medium has. If every medium carries an educational potential, the use of video-games as a learning tool still remains largely undefined. To implement video game within the educational system may look like a radical revolution. We should try different solutions: the so called " gamification " approach, using videogame dynamics within our common educational framework or " Simulation Based Learning " using virtual worlds in which teachers and students can simulate experiences by their own rules. Experience based Learning provided by video games may become the ultimate form of contextual education. It is able to simulate a real-life experience, improving both student engagement and learning. We have to look at the games as a tool, whose value in education depends on how they are used as part a comprehensive strategy. The traditional methods of education are focused on the acquisition of skills in the individual subjects, often neglecting crucial components for success, such as communication and collaboration. I try to define an optimal, real-life solution that decreases the centrality of the written medium, currently at the base of the educational system, merging and integrating it with new tools and techniques, adding to the traditional literacy processes a renewed techno-literacy, necessary for students to communicate and learn.

Video Games as Tools for Education

Computer and video games are a channel of evolution and productivity that is most consumed keeping the notice of scholars through a variety of disciplines. In general, computers and video games were ignored by educators. When educators considered the games, they noticed the social consequences of gambling, ignoring the remarkable educational potential of the game. This article looks at the history of educational research games and argues that the perceptive potential of games has been ignored by educators. Current developments in the game, including interactive stories, authoring tools, and digital world collaboration, suggest powerful new opportunities for educational media. Video games are an important part of improving education through its ability to force players to present realistic simulations of real-life situations. The beginning of the proper use of gaming technologies for education and training and there is no need for scientific and engineering methods to create games not only as a more realistic simulation of the physical world but to provide experience Effective learning. This document illustrates building up to date Integration of educational principles and game design into dialogue between them and defining games that can be integrated based on design, entertainment and educational features. The work follows a drawing tray that forms part of the framing definition and after selecting categories of design templates, before focusing on user interaction modes, from a pedagogical point of view, given its relevance to end users

LEARNING THROUGH RECONSTRUCTING REALITY: VIDEO GAMES AS AN ALTERNATIVE ‘TOOL’. ISSUES OF RESEARCH AND IMPLEMENTATION

Without a doubt computer technology holds great potential for improving the way that people learn. Through the use of network resources, learners can engage in individualized instruction where they can investigate and learn concepts and content to meet their specific needs. A significant number of case studies conducted by academic researchers are published every year concerning the new “Edutainment” (education and entertainment, education via entertainment) form of modern educational approach, most important of which is the “Games To Teach” project under the concurrence of Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Edutainment materials are bringing about a change in the definition of the learning process as they attract and hold the attention of the learners by engaging their emotions through a computer monitor full of vividly coloured animations (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2000). Playing games is an important part of our social and mental development. The advent of personal computers with superior graphics systems has precipitated an explosion in game software. The multimillion game industries produce many different kinds of games which cultivate cognitive functions, motivation and remove players from the “real world”. It involves an interactive pedagogy and, in Buckingham et al's words, totally depends on an obsessive insistence that learning is inevitably "fun”. Many researches (Lepper and Cordova, 1992; Quinn, 1994, 1997) underline that the games can benefit education practice and learning if they combine fun elements with aspects of instructional design and system design that include motivational, learning and interactive components. These facts demonstrate a close association between play and learning. Computer games are gaining unprecedented access to the homes, minds and souls of people today. Hence, it has become increasingly important for game developers and educators to study the application of computers for enhancing the education offered to the next generation of students. Computer games enhance learning through visualization, experimentation and creativity of play (Betz, 1995) and often include problems that develop critical thinking (Amory et al., 1999). Computer games can be used to give a better form of education and can even make computers become the unique tools of learning. In the current research a different approach is proposed to the new “Edutainment” form of education, oriented in the integration of aspects of the game design process in the Greek National Curriculum. Based upon the collaborative action research and using grounded theory techniques (biographical analysis) and semi-structured interviews on a 20 K-12 students sample, it consists of a project which applies the means of designing a computer (video) game on several courses directed by the Greek National Curriculum. Being more specific, the educator may emerge or enhance several students’ skills such as collaboration between himself and her students, individual learning, brainstorming, critical and strategic thinking and creative writing through conducting a project in which certain courses will be approached though the stages of the game design process. These stages consist of script writing, character creation, scene direction, music setting, sound and visual effects immersion and can be approached through the courses of Greek Language, Geography, Arts Education, Greek Literature and Greek History courses. Thus, learners acquire those cognitive skills viewed as the fundamental objectives of the curriculum of studies through processes of playing and fun while they engage into something that meets their specific needs.

Game and Video Game. Reflections between education and entertainment

Gamepaddle. Video Games. Education. Empowerment, 2016

The educational and training potentials of video games - which have been debated in the teaching context over the last years - have seen a slow but progressive shift of the attitude of the institutions and people in training agencies of every order and degree towards the acknowledgement of the many training and educational potentials of the medium, although it has not yet been possible to define the dimensions through which video game should be observed from a teaching point of view

Virtual Scenarios Digital Identities and Reality: an educational approach to Videogames

Technology, educational approach, videogames, virtual reality, didactic, pedagogical problematicism In our contemporary environment, characterised by globalisation, an increasingly mobile population, new languages that graft onto old ones, we must deeply reflect on the directions that technological and info-tech progress on one hand, and the processes of socialisation and communication on the other, are leading us. A representative of this complex mixture of technological models and social and cultural matrices of the mediatic system is without doubt the controversial and much-debated videogame. A word that provokes contrasting attitudes and opinions, from almost scornful indifference ("they are so futile") to the crusade against their destructive and damaging power over young people, to the greatest levels of passion and exaltation, which incite in their fans an incessant research into and updating of the latest novelties offered continuously by the telematic market. The videoludic environment emerges among complexities, enthusiasm and often also false illusions, involving heterogeneous users, among the young but also among adults, triggering different processes of socialisation, both in terms of individuals and groups, of "virtual communities", fuelling the psychopedagogical debate over the potentials and risks linked to the use of electronic games. Over the past few years, the range of different types available on the market has been widened and diversified: no longer simply 'First person shooter' or 'Beat 'em ups', but videogames which become more and more hybrids between culture, information, the object of thought and criticism over social dynamics. There is a rich production of digital games (often free and easily downloadable from the internet) that are extremely complex in terms of subject matter, aesthetics and ideologies, their creators and designers being independent from the publishers which govern the global market, but who aim in their games to develop aspects linked to critical information, the upheaval of uniformised thought, the production of critical and aware reflection on modern society. These are the so-called serious games, "subversive videogames", "persuasive games", "invincible games", "news-games", which uphold a veritable v-ideology through game models. In these new cultural scenarios, videogames are taking on an increasingly emergent and complex role of the ideal meeting point between technology, entertainment, literature, cinema, art, and mass communication. The cultural context in which this is set fluctuates between various environments, which in some ways are apparently very far apart, showing their polysemous nature, now as a medium, now as an instrument, now as a product with linguistic, iconographic and thematic codes, now as a product of contemporary culture: "the medium is the message" say McLuhan 2 , and so the media is not merely a window on to the world, but is itself part of the reality it describes. While understanding and analysing the critical position of researchers, parents and teachers -the position of whom is often linked to the denunciation of risks linked to videogames such as alienation, deprivation of opportunities for socialisation, the simulation of violent behaviour, pathological addiction to the screen, etc. -the view aimed to create herein is that of the training potential of the videogame tool, both as the object of the training itself and as a training tool, as an information container. Here we aim to overcome a nostalgic attitude towards a better tradition of innovation, which is opposed to the advancing new world in terms of both ethics and values, in order to create instead a view that welcomes the challenges of technological innovation, aware not of their neutrality, but of the importance and integrated approach. The educational challenge launched by the explosive social and cultural phenomenon of videogames, which have become veritable communication media, is that of being less and less forms of ludic entertainment for the sake of fun and more and more metaphors of the great game of life. The challenge is that of considering videogames as a contemporary tool in the "tool kit" of a good educator, 1 This is a part of my PhD research, R. Nardone, I nuovi scenari educ@tivi del Videogioco, Ed. Junior, 2007 2 M. McLuhan,

Video games in the process of historical education at the academic level, Colloquium, t. 4/2012, p. 75-82.

Video games in the process of historical education at the academic level, 2012

"This piece deals with the significance of computer games in the modern teaching process. The author identified the main challenges for the teachers that are related to problems created by electronic entertainment. The second part of the text focuses on the positive impact of video games exemplified by popular „mods” based on actual historical events. In conclusion, the author stated that it will still be many years before computer games are used by researchers in the process of teaching the academic youth, however they do have the potential to become something more than just pure fun."

RDG 440 Computer Gaming, Learning, and Literacy - Syllabus (2012)

If you are an undergraduate in the 2010s, you are part of what some authors call "the gaming generation." During your lifetime, computer and video games became an integral part of our society, with games such as Farmville, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto attracting millions of players. These games are having a cultural impact far beyond their role as entertainment or economic commodities; they offer a myriad of experiences that can change the ways we learn, tell stories, interact with one another, acquire technology skills, and understand the world.